Statement Of The Central Committee Of The Rainbow People's Party On The May Day Demonstrations

STATEMENT OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE RAINBOW PEOPLE'S PARTY ON THE MAY DAY DEMONSTRATIONS

Thousands of our brothers and sisters will be gathering in Washington D.C. this week to demonstrate against the criminal continuance of the war against the peoples of Indochina by the United States government and the gangster elements it fronts for. The Mayday demonstrations and the series of actions which have been planned to follow it are meant to show the government that there are people in this country who won't go along with its vicious genocidal policies, its official racist extermination campaigns to make the world safe for imperialism by any means necessary -- people who will put their "freedom" and even their very lives on the line to demónstrate their unshakable support for their heroic brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos who are struggling to defend their right to determine their own destinies in peace.

The Rainbow People 's Party stands united with our brothers and sisters in Washington this weekend against the forces of U. S. imperialism which oppress not only the peoples of Indochina but likewise the people of the domestic colonies of imperialism right here in Babylon--young people, black people, red people, as well as the masses of Euro-Amerikan working people who have been brainwashed into supporting the government's inhuman policies at home and abroad.

We support any and all demonstrations against the imperialist power structure and its vicious crimes, any acts which expose the gangsters and thugs who hold power in this country and which show the masses of the people how they operate. At the same time we have to say that simple demonstrations or simple acts of revolutionary violence against the symbols of imperialist terror and exploitation are not nearly enough -- what we need is an on-going, highly organized, thoroughly committed, completely conscious, centrally directed, concentrated and unified movement of people which will work every day and in every possible way to stop the imperialist conspiracy against the people of the world, a movement which is capable of cutting off the head of the octopus itself , freeing the peoples of the earth from the deathgrip of its slimy tentacles, and destroying every trace of its beastly culture so that all of us can pass free into the New World which we have dreamed of for so long and which is finally now possible.

This movement is not going to come together overnight, it is not going to grow magically out of a demonstration or even a string of related demonstrations, it is not going to spring up out of the ruins of a few blasted buildings or the rhetoric of even the most inspired revolutionaries--it can only be built by people working day after day in their local communities, among their own people, along lines and around issues which are directly connected to the everyday lives of those people. But it is not a local movement we are talking about either -- each locality must see itself as part of a national movement, and as part of a planetary movement, which is committed to eliminating the monster beast of imperialism and its death culture so that all of us -- all the people on earth -- can grow together into one great human tribe, one huge Rainbow Nation of post-western peoples free to develop our human potential to its highest possible realization.

We have to demonstrate every day, we have to make our lives themselves a demonstration of our opposition to this monster of imperialism, and not only of our opposition but at the same time of the alternative society with which we would replace it, the New Life we want to live with each other and with all our sisters and brothers the world over. We have to open up our movement to all the people in this country -- all the people in the mother country who are already opposed to the war, who are already trying to fight industrial pollution and corruption, who already sense that they are living inside a dying beast but don't know what to do about it. Our demonstrations and our public actions, even our presence itself, have awakened a whole lot more people over the past ten years than we think, because we keep trying to stir them up and what we don't understand is that they don't need demonstrations once a year anymore, or once a month, they need daily demonstrations which will show them how they can get out of the beast's clutches and into new ways of living and moving which can liberate them and give them the kind of Life they know they're missing.

It's going to be hard to do this, and it's going to take a lot more time than we thought it would a couple years ago maybe, but there's no way to get around doing it and if we don't do it there's no way we are going to be able even to survive. This is what the government knows, and this is why the government loves it so much when we do things that will alienate us from the broad masses of the Euro-Amerikan people so many of us have tended to despise in the past. Because a revolution is a mass movement, a movement of the masses of the people for their collective liberation, and unless all of us who are already into something beautiful start reaching out to the masses of the people out there in Amerika and start sharing what we have found out about our New Life with them, we will only see them get whipped into line and mobilized against us by their slavemasters and "owners", who keep telling them that we're their enemies and the greedhead manipulators are their friends.

We have to start digging where the people are at instead of projecting our own fantasies onto them, we have to see that there are literally millions of people out there in Amerika who are ready to be organized and moved in wholly new ways, and we have to reach out to these people, not on television or pictures in the newspapers but on the streets and in their daily lives, to draw them into our new Life forms so we can all move together into the future, which is not Washington D. C. but some new place which so far exists only in our visions and dreams. We have to build this place, is what we mean to say, and we have to do it together, every day, from now on. Then. and only then, will we make the revolution of our lives.

All Power to the People! Rainbow Power to the People of the Future! Revolution is the Way to Life! LET IT GROW! LET IT GROW!

Central Gommittee, Rainbow People's Party May 1, 1971

STATEMENT OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE

RAINBOW PEOPLE'S PARTY

NATION

Brothers and Sisters,

This first issue of the new Ann Arbor Sun is also the first product of a new organization -- the Rainbow People's Party. But just as the paper has appeared before in a different form, so has the Rainbow People's Party developed from one form to another, and the purpose of both is still the same -- to serve the people of the Ann Arbor community, to do whatever we can to get the people what they need. But all of us are growing all the time, and we keep changing and inventing new forms for our lives. That's what's happened with the the SUN, and that's also what's happened with us. We just want to put all of this out in front in this first issue so all of us can understand what's going down.

We've reached a new turning point in our history, and we feel that the people should know what's happening with us so we can all work better together in the future. The White Panther Party has been dissolved, but the people who have been most closely associated with the WPP in Ann Arbor have formed a new organization with a new name, a new structure, and new methods of work. We're just saying this now, but we hope you will be able to see the changes for yourselves as we start our new programs. You'll be the ones who can judge us and see if we're living up to what we say we want to do.

This newspaper is only the most obvious manifestation of where we're at now, but as we grow and as all of us grow closer together -- we hope to do a lot more than this. But we know that we can only do it if all of us work together -- the whole community -- so we can come to have control over our own lives. So we start with the information -- this paper -- and we work from there.

We say this is a new turning point in our history, because we've gone through a number of major turning points as an organization in the six and a half years we've been together. We started in Detroit in 1964 as the Artists' Workshop, and we worked under that name until the first part of 1967, when the Artists' Workshop joined with a lot of other people in the hip community to form Trans-Love Energies. Trans-Love was like a coalition of freeks -- rock and roll bands, light shows, poets, head shops, news papers, artisans and craftspeople, acid-heads, marijuana maniacs and all kinds of other people from the community.

In May of 1968 the hard core of Love Energies, about 30 people, moved to Ann Arbor and rented two big houses on Hill Street. In the process we consolidated 4 communes into 2, and we all lived and did our work together. We went through a lot of changes together too -- getting busted, beat up by police, arrested for playing free music in the parks as well as getting recording contracts for two of our bands (the MC5 and the Stooges, both of which are no longer with us). We went to Chicago to play at the Festival of Life and watched our brothers and sisters get beat up in the streets. All of these things put us through a lot af changes, and by the late fall of 1968 we had reached another major turning point.

In November of 1968 we formed the White Panther Party. We didn't do this to be funny, although it might've looked like that at the time. We had learned through our experience in the streets, the ballrooms and the parks that we couldn't just "do our thing" anymore without being prepared to protect ourselves and getting ourselves more together so we could deal with the increasing assaults on us and our people by the police and the whole established order. We were truly inspired by the example the Black Panther Party was setting in the black community, so we decided that the answer to our problems would be to form a White Panther Party to deal with the needs of the emerging youth community in Ann Arbor and Detroit.

As we went along and the band (the MC 5) started traveling around the country to play for the people, we started thinking of ourselves as a national organization, even though we weren't even organized enough to take care of business at home. In fact we were so untogether that we let the State of Michigan rip our Chairman, John Sinclair off in July, 1969, and put him in the penitentiary for 9 1/2 - 10 years for possession of two joints. Still, we didn't learn from this incredible mistake, and we still didn't learn when Pun went underground in October of 1969 after hearing on the radio that the U. S. government had issued indictments for him and me and brother Jack Forrest of Detroit for "conspiring to bomb" the Ann Arbor CIA office a year before.

We went on pretending that we had our thing together, and we didn't start to wake up until after Pun and Jack and Skip were captured in the Upper Peninsula on July 23, 1970. When that happened -- as the result of a whole chain of ridiculous errors -- we finally began to realize how disorganized and untogether we were, and we started trying to figure out our mistakes for real. We've gone through a whole lot more changes since last July, and where we're at now is the result of nine months of discussion, criticism and self-criticism, self-purge, monster toke-downs and meetings, and a total reexamination of our methods of thinking and methods of work.

We changed our name to Rainbow People's Party because we feel that it's a lot more expressive of what we are and what we want to be than "White Panther Party" could ever be. We realized that it's impossible to paste on names and organizational forms which other organizations have used successfully, because our situation demands that we deal with it on its own terms. And we realized that we really weren't "white panthers" either-- we're freeks, Rainbow People, rock and roll maniacs who want to create a whole new way of life for ourselves in this weirdo place -- and that the way we'll do it isn't by spouting a lot of slogans and trying to be "more revolutionary" than everyone else.

We call ourselves "Rainbow People" because that is what we are, first af all -- the culture that defines us is not a "white" culture at all, but a true Rainbow Culture borrowing from many different peoples -- our music comes from black culture, our sacraments (marijuana, peyote, mescaline) from brown and red (American Indian) cultures, our philosophy and sciences from yellow (Eastern) culture, our clothing from red culture. And our vision of the future is that of a free and beautiful Rainbow Nation that includes all of the people on the planet. We wear the colors of the Rainbow, and what we seek is self-determination for all peoples working in harmony, just as the colors of the rainbow remain distinct but shine together to make a brilliant, harmonious whole thing.

The way we'll get what we need is by getting together with all our brothers and sisters in the community and working to build up the New Nation we all dream about. It will be a Rainbow Nation, a union of liberated people dedicated to creating a whole new life form on the planet, a New Life Culture in which every man, woman and child on earth is free to develop his or her humanity to its highest possible degree. That's what we want to do, and that's what we're determined to bring into life, starting right here in Ann Arbor.

Another thing we realized was that it was silly of us to attempt to organize a "national party" before being well organized in Ann Arbor or even in our own commune. The Rainbow People's Party exists only in Ann Arbor at this point, and we will not be opening any chapters or doing any organizational work outside this area until we've got ourselves together with the people here.

A lot of people probably wonder what a "party" is, anyway, and why are we so concerned with forming "parties" and stuff like that. A party is an organization of people who make their whole thing serving the people in one form or another. We've learned through our experience that the main problem in the youth community here and throughout the youth colony is that the people are not organized, and without organizing themselves, coming together to deal with their collective problems, it's hard for people even to survive. We know we couldn'tve survived over the years if we hadn't been organized (even if our organization wasn't together), and we can see that the community as a whole has the same problem.

If our community here were organized, for example, we could prevent the kind of confusion and paranoia that set in after the Argus raid; we could deal with the smack problem that's disrupting our whole community; we could provide for our daily needs so it wouldn't be so hard just to survive from day to day; and we could eventually come to have a great deal of control over our own lives. In this respect the people's party should serve as an example of organized strength for the people, and, being organized itself, it should help its brothers and sisters in the community develop organizational forms for dealing with their problem on a day to day basis.

The main thing we want to do right now to make this a reality is to work with the Ann Arbor Tribal Council to set up an organization for the youth community -- an organization of the people, by the people, and for the people that will bring effective power into the hands of the people. The Rainbow People's Party puts itself at the service of the Tribal Council, and of the community as a whole. This newspaper is the people's newspaper, and its only purpose is to serve the people however it can. This is your party and your newspaper -- use us the best way you know how, and we'll do everything we can to work with you now and in the future. That's all we want to do - SERVE THE PEOPLE!

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
RAINBOW POWER TO THE LIFE CULTURE
LET IT GROW
LET IT GROW
Central Committee, Rainbow Peoples' Party